Review of Stapledon’s Starmaker

This is a book – it seems inaccurate to call it a novel – that receives no justice from a brief description or even a review of limited scope. In basic terms, the plot is quite straightforward: a man is sitting on a hillside gazing at the night sky when he is suddenly whisked up and sent on a mystical, time- and space-spanning journey across the history of the universe. Then, having seen the marvels of the universe, he returns to his family hearthside, wiser and better able to cope with mundane vicissitudes.

Read the full review here.

Review of Stross’s The Fuller Memorandum

 

Horrors from beyond space and time continue to stalk the universe, irrespective of whether anyone else really wants them to and with indeed blithe indifference to the desires of humans, cultists, civilians and Laundry operatives. Fortunately for the sanity of humanity, the way into our perception of the universe is long and tangled and requires such things as chanting, the stars being right, blood sacrifices and advanced algorithmic calculations in the field of combat epistemology. The bad news, of course, is that all of these once very onerous requirements are now easily available via a laptop computer or even a smart phone – the Necronom-Ipod, perhaps.

Read the full review here.

Review of Wasserman and Katz’s The Invisible Manager

There are so many management self-help books available these days that many if not most of them have begun to rely on gimmicks to try to stand out from the swelling throng. It is very refreshing, therefore, to come across one that relies on careful observation of human behaviour and pragmatic responses to the problems likely to be encountered in the course of a managerial career. Authors Wasserman and Katz draw upon their many years of experience as management consultants to find a series of vignettes which are presented in straightforward language with the lessons to be learned clearly signposted.

Read the full review here.

Review of Briggs’ Five Dances with Death

The southern continent and central region of the Americas has not been well served in fiction (or other artistic productions) in terms of characters recounting experiences from their own perspective. There has been a reasonable amount of cultural production in which the indigenous people act as a backdrop to the adventures of western adventurers or as extras in some other style. It is very refreshing, therefore, to come across a work of historical fiction which takes seriously its charge to tell a story of the Nahuatl people and their interactions with neighbours and invaders as the central part of the narrative.

Read the full review here.

Review of Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

Modern Japanese literature so often seems to be concerned primarily with a search for something that is authentic, perhaps in the sense of providing a transcendental escape from mundane reality or perhaps just to banish the lies and myth-making of the past. Japan’s rapid change from legendary home to emperor and heroes to post-modern wasteland mediated by the violence of nuclear explosions and military defeat seems to have destroyed fundamental beliefs in the fundamental verities of society.

Read the full review here: http://www.bookideas.com/reviews/index.cfm?fuseaction=displayReview&id=6423

Review of Balibar’s The Philosophy of Marx

There are a number of difficulties in trying first to understand the thought of Marx and, second, in trying to convey or teach this to other people. The most obvious of these problems is the form and content of Marx’s own writings, which demand a degree of imagination and perseverance that not everyone is willing to provide.

Read the full review here: http://www.bookideas.com/reviews/index.cfm?fuseaction=displayReview&id=6425.

Review of Vega’s Majesty’s Offspring

We are in the future in a fast-moving world of spaceships, guns, and rapid reversals of fortune. Hackers steal into corporate sites to discover their secrets. Dangerous alien creatures serve as watchdogs to keep out the many unwanted predators of the world. Men will have to be bold, resilient, and willing to seize the day in order to succeed in achieving their goals in the teeth of the hostility of the galaxy and, indeed, of society. Exotic drugs present new dangers to people unwise enough to think they can handle them – it is a time for space cowboy heroes, in short.

Read the full review here.

Review of Poonvoralak’s The Most Silent School in the World

Eight children, of varying ages and characteristics, interact with each other in the eponymous silent school, which appears to be a school without teachers or indeed external purpose. The children are free to do whatever they want and to develop themselves or not develop according to their own proclivities. They include Earth Din, Water Nam, Mountain Pukao, and Pond Bueng – or, in other words, the same meaning of a name in both English and Thai.

Read the full review here.

Review of Stewart and May’s In the Shadow of Angkor

There is a moment in one of Ho Anh Thai’s collection of short stories Behind the Red Mist when one of the characters, among his circle of now middle-aged revolutionaries and facing the miseries of aerial bombardment and privation, asks whether this is, at least in part, all our own fault. It is a moment that lifts the story above so many others from the Mekong Region which I have read over the years and which fail to ask the same question.

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Review of Slocomb’s Economic History of Cambodia in the Twentieth Century

 

In previous work, notably her book Colons and Coolies, Margaret Slocomb has demonstrated her understanding of the workings of Cambodia’s economy and society in the context of the colonial rubber plantation industry.

Read the full review here.